AIGLX mess in FC5-6

Adam Pribyl pribyl at lowlevel.cz
Fri Aug 25 10:57:55 UTC 2006


First I'd like to say, there is still lot of confusion about AIGXL and 
composition managers in Fedora. From time the FC5 was released there is 
not clear statement, wherether the AIGLX is really in Xorg that is 
distributed with FC as it seems from Release notes
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/release-notes-ISO/#id3148356
or it has to be installed separately as described here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/AiglxOnFedora

According to my experience AIGLX is not included in basic FC instalation 
and you have to extend the repository to aiglx and update your 
instalation. Without this you only get flickering screen and loose your 
window decoration when triing to enable the metacity composition with 
gconftool-2. If you try to install AIGLX and use compiz from aiglx 
repository at the moment, you get unresolved dependencies for libwnck >= 
2.15.4, in FC5 there is now latest 2.14.3.
In the case you want to revert AIGLX updates there is no describtion how 
to do that.

In FC5 gdm configuration, man can choose to use "aiglx" server (Xair). 
There si no such thing like Xair anymore from official sources. Switching 
this results in unusable X and hand edits to gdm configuration.

There is nowhere clearly stated what graphics card the AIGLX is confirmed 
working or was tested on. On the page
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx
it says all Radeon 7000-9250 is known to work, however, from my personal 
experience, on Radeon 9200 it is not working as it should (got blue 
screen with shadows switching with screen with menus and apps - unusable).
It does not state wherether I have to use for ATI Radeon cards "radeon" 
driver or "ati" driver or this does not mather.

I am also curious, wherether AIGLX could work without DRI or not, and I am 
not alone. There are several people, that report glxinfo says No to 
render, however AIGLX says enabled (I did not saw it personaly.).

Even there is no big interest in Fedora Project AIGLX working with 
proprietary fglrx and nvidia drivers, it would be nice to make sure the 
statement that is on aiglx page
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx?highlight=%28aiglx%29#head-df1959e565dbcf41eba56dc070062e7af60e8a63
is still true or not.

Also, browsing the internet discussion and e.g. ubuntu/gentoo pages, I 
found lot of issues that may arise with AIGXL - e.g. slow firefox 
scrolling etc. Definitely, the Xorg with AIGLX causes some people to not 
be able to set some resolution. There are none of those mentioned on 
fedoraproject AIGLX pages.

As those pages are main source people get when asking goolge etc. about 
aiglx, it would be nice if anybody WHO KNOWS (I am not the one) what the 
status really is, updates those pages.

Similar applies for FC6t.. there is too big mist around this feature that 
is so interesting for desktop users. And I think it's pity.


Adam Pribyl




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